5 Tips to Optimize Your Camp’s Website for User Engagement
When it comes to recruiting and retaining campers and volunteers, facilitating registration, and providing parents with necessary information, your nonprofit camp’s website is your most valuable digital resource.
Your website should be just as user-friendly as your camps are kid-friendly. Ideally, website visitors will have a streamlined experience that makes it easy to understand what your camp is all about, access logistical information, and fill out camper registration forms quickly.
In this guide, we’ll explore these five tips that will help optimize your camp’s website:
Keep your camp website up to date.
Make your website accessible and easy to use.
Use consistent branding.
Incorporate calls to action based on user intent.
Ensure your content is engaging and appealing.
The elements that make an effective camp website are the same aspects that comprise any successful nonprofit website. Namely, these include user-friendly links and forms, engaging content, and streamlined navigation. Let’s dive deeper into the strategies that will make your camp website an effective resource for years to come.
1. Keep your camp website up to date.
The first step in optimizing your website to improve the user experience is ensuring that your site’s foundation is stable and reliable. If your site’s structure or code is outdated or not robust enough to support your content, it may be time to consider a revamp.
Keep your website’s foundation updated by taking the following steps:
Implement security patches as soon as they’re available. Incorporating security updates urgently keeps your site as safe as possible from potential hacking.
Audit your website regularly to catch usability issues. Audit your site manually by testing your forms, links, mobile format, and accessibility. Run performance checks to test for site speed and identify factors that might be slowing down your site.
These tests and updates ensure that your site is secure, which goes a long way in building trust and credibility with visitors. When your foundation is solid, you can begin iterating on your design and other aspects that make your site visually appealing.
2. Make your website accessible and easy to use.
Web accessibility is not only a key element of a positive user experience — it’s also required for nonprofits. Focusing on accessibility helps create a nonprofit camp website that’s easy for all visitors to use and understand without barriers.
Here are a few tips to get you started:
Follow established accessibility guidelines. This includes adding alternative text for images, using sufficient color contrast, and following all other regulations laid out in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
Use a mobile-friendly design. Check to ensure that your buttons are large enough to be clicked on a mobile device and that your font is easy to read.
Ensure your forms are accessible. Your camp’s registration form, waivers, and other forms should also be accessible for users of all varying abilities. Ensure your forms can be accessed via keyboard navigation, include descriptive form labels, and don’t have any time limits.
Manually assess your website’s accessibility by navigating the site using a keyboard or zooming in to 200% on your screen and browsing the site that way. These tests replicate the experience of using assistive technology and can help you catch any issues that automated tests might accidentally skip.
3. Use consistent branding.
Your camp’s brand identity makes your website more memorable and recognizable to visitors. Having a uniform brand also helps boost credibility because it shows prospective participants that your camp is organized and aligned around a collective mission.
An easy way to make sure your site is on brand is to do a “consistency check.” Click through your website pages and look for:
Outdated logos
Mismatched fonts
Antiquated content
Users should be able to identify your camp’s brand whether they’re online, on mobile, or in person. It’s especially important to use consistent branding on your camp’s online giving page. Prospective donors will be reassured that their donations are going to the right place when they see your familiar logo, fonts, and colors.
Kwala recommends creating a brand kit to help keep your website’s visual look cohesive. Your brand kit should include specific guidelines for using each of your brand elements, such as logo dimensions and approved formats and guidelines for abbreviating your organization’s name. Your staff can use this resource for updating your website and creating other marketing materials like emails and direct mailings.
4. Incorporate calls to action based on user intent.
When visitors land on your website, you only have a handful of seconds to capture their attention and prove that your site is valuable to them. That’s why your website design should make it as easy as possible for visitors to find the information they’re looking for.
To appeal to different user intentions, incorporate a variety of calls to action (CTAs). CTAs are buttons that help visitors navigate your site and complete their intended actions.
Create CTAs that speak to your primary audiences, such as:
Prospective and current campers and their families. If your camp caters to teens, they might be more likely to look up your website themselves. If you primarily serve young campers, their guardians will likely be your primary website audience. Either way, make sure you include homepage CTAs leading visitors to your registration page or camp schedule.
Prospective and current staff or volunteers. Your camp’s website can be an effective recruitment tool to help find new counselors and volunteers. Incorporate CTAs leading to your counselor information page and your staff or volunteer application form.
Prospective and current donors. Many nonprofit camps rely on donations to help maintain operations. Ensure your camp’s website includes prominent buttons directing traffic to your online donation page to help you raise more.
Include CTAs on your homepage and within your navigational menu. Your CTAs should include eye-catching colors and bold text to capture visitors’ attention.
5. Ensure your content is engaging and appealing.
In addition to making your site intuitive and easy to use, it should also be enjoyable for your audience. This is where your content comes into play.
Your content brings your camp to life for prospective campers and their families, helping them envision what it would be like to participate in your program.
Ensure your content appeals to a broad audience by taking these steps:
Include visual content that reflects the diversity of your campers, staff, programs, and activities.
Spotlight what makes your camp special in multimedia blog posts that feature photos and videos in addition to text.
Include plenty of opportunities for visitor interaction, such as quizzes, polls, or surveys.
Ensure your content is responsive across multiple devices, such as smartphones, tablets, and laptops. Top content management systems like Drupal or WordPress manage this process automatically. When you use these systems, you can verify what your content looks like on the live site before pushing it live, allowing you to iron out any issues and deliver higher-quality content.
A user-friendly camp website drives camper registration and retention, keeping your program healthy and thriving. Test your site regularly and ask for feedback from your staff and audience. This ensures that you’re staying on top of evolving user needs and expectations.
AUTHOR: ANNE STEFANYK
As Founder and CEO of Kanopi Studios, Anne helps clarify project needs and turns client conversations into actionable outcomes. She enjoys helping clients identify problems and empowering the Kanopi team to execute great solutions.
Anne advocates for open source and co-organizes the Bay Area Drupal Camp. When she’s not contributing to the community or running her thoughtful web agency, she enjoys yoga, meditation, treehouses, dharma, cycling, paddle boarding, kayaking, and hanging with her nephew.